Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Mauricio and Esteban have been working hard on their latest book on jBPM and today, their jBPM5 Developer Guide has been released !

I believe Mauricio and Esteban have done a good job in including a lot of valuable information for people with different backgrounds. They start with an introduction to BPM in general, give an overview of how to model processes using the BPMN 2.0 standard, show how to do all of this with jBPM and then go even further by showing more complex examples that for example include business rule integration, etc.

You can get both as a eBook or printed (which includes a free eBook as well) from Packt Publishing here.

I'm even able to offer you some discount codes, 20% off for the printed version and 25% off for the eBook. I think that's a very nice gesture of Packt Publishing, showing once more they try to support open-source with benefits like this. Note that they have a limited validity for use till 1st Feb, 2013.

In order to apply the codes, you will need to:
- Visit the Packt website and log in to your account (non-registered
users will be required to create an account first)
- Open the book-page
and add the book to cart
- On the cart check-out page, enter code
in the Enter promotional code box and then Update
cart

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The bits were ready more than a week ago already (and looking at the download statistics quite a few of you already found them ;)), but a busy travel schedule made it difficult to complete the work and announce everything. But here it is !

The jBPM installer is probably the best way to get started. Download the full installer and follow the documentation here to walk through some of the most important components.

So what's new?

Simulation

We've added simulation capabilities to the web-based process designer, that allows you to simulate how a process might behave at runtime. This includes the addition of various simulation-related properties (like resources and duration-related attributes for tasks, and probabilities for diverging gateways etc.). Our implementation is based on the specification created by the BPSWG (Business Process Simulation Working Group).

Based on these properties, you can run a number of instances of your process and:

Use the path finder to look at all identified paths

Look at the generated charts containing information about minimal, maximum and average completion times, etc. using (horizontal and vertical barcharts, pie charts or tables.

Check the timeline to get an overview of all the recorded events

Maciej did a blog recently on the ideas and concepts behind it, and Tihomir did a blog, including a 12-minute video, that shows simulation in action.

Local task service

When human actors participate in a business process (also known as human workflow), a task service is used to manage the life cycle of the tasks (claiming, completing, task lists, etc.). While we supported the use of a centralized task service (using HornetQ for remoting), we now also support a local version that runs as a simple Java component next to the engine and all the work it does is synchronous and nicely integrated with the transaction of the process engine.

We have improved our Spring support, where you can use a Spring configuration file to configure your environment and inject a ksession and/or task service into your application code. For transactions, it integrates with the Spring transaction manager, supporting both JTA and RESOURCE_LOCAL with shared entity manager factory (emf) or shared entity manager (em).

JPA2

jBPM runtime persistence can now also use JPA2 for persistence. That means it is completely independent of the underlying persistence provider (we use Hibernate by default but other persistence providers should be possible as well). You can use Hibernate4 with JPA2 for even better performance. For all the details on how to do this, here's a link to a persistence configuration file for both JPA1 and JPA2.

Some of the other features

Improvements on some of the BPMN 2.0 constructs in the core engine, related to error events, terminating end events in sub processes,

Introduction of a business calendar related to timers etc.

The ability to start a process by name, which will automatically start the latest version of that process.

We created separate wars for EE6 (AS7) and EE5 (AS5) to avoid a lot of manual dependency management. JBoss AS 7.1.1 is now the new default application server in the installer.

Improved support for invoking web services from inside your processes.

A database-backed solution for managing which users are part of which group (UserGroupCallback).

When configuring handlers for domain-specific services, the ksession is automatically injected as an optional constructor parameter in the handler configuration file.

The details on all fixed issues and new features can be found in detail in JIRA.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Join us for Red Hat Integration and BPM Week
virtual event on October 15-18, 2012.

There you will learn about Red Hat's integration and BPM road map, find
out how recent acquisitions will be integrated into the portfolio, and
gain practical knowledge from the engineering leaders that are driving
the most popular integration, messaging and rules, and BPM technologies
and standards.

One registration grants access to all 17 information-packed webinar sessions!

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

In 4 weeks, the IntelliFest 2012 conference will take place in San Diego (starting Monday October 22nd). IntelliFest is the successor of RulesFest and as always brings a mix of presentations, both for managers and developers, and bootcamps to get the practical experience.

As part of that, there will also be a FREE Drools & jBPM bootcamp and a healthcare day. Tihomir will take care of the jBPM presentations there, giving an overview of jBPM, BPMN2 and human tasks.

1600-1620Dr Xiao Hu, Department of Neurosurgery, University of CaliforniaClinical Decision Support Driven Alarms

1630-1700Panel Discussion - Collaboration Opportunities

Tuesday - General Drools&jBPM Workshop (free)

8.00 AM: Breakfast Social – pre-laptop setup, and QA time with solution Architects.-Key will be provided to setup your laptop, so you can view and run the examples used during the talks.

9.00 BRMS Product Overview (Prakash Aradhya 15min)
How we turn the Drools and jBPM communtiy parts into a world class
product. Supporting and harvesting all the innovation done in the open
community, Red Hat delivers reliable, dependable and integrated
solutions for enterprise customers.

11.05 Introduction to jBPM and BPMN2 (Tihomir Surdilovic 45min)
jBPM is a BPM engine designed for flexible processes, implementing and
extending the BPMN2 spec. Built form the ground up to be part of a
unified strategy for business automation and decision management. jBPM
fully integrates with Drools Expert and Fusion.

11.45 Decision Modelling with Graphical Editors (Edson Tirelli 30min)
Drools Expert provides sophisticated web based tooling, around decision
tables, guided editors and templates. Our decision modelling approach
draws from the very best research found at Dr Jan Vanthienien school of
Decision Modelling.

13.30 Human Tasks up Close and Personal (Tihomir Surdilovic 40min)
Human tasks are a central component of BPM. This example driven talk
will build an example live, demonstrating what jBPM’s Human Task
technology can do for you.

14.20 Building Games with Drools – Pong, Snake and Wumpus (Mark Proctor 40min)
Time for some hard play, learn how to build classic computer games with
Drools. These also provide interesting exercises in BA requirements
gathering.

15.50 Drools Chance for Imperfect Reasoning (Davide Sottara 40min)
Sometimes data quality is not perfect, so facts may not be known with
precision and certainty. Likewise, crisp constraints such as hard
thresholds might not be able to capture the complexity of a business
policy. Drools Chance allows to apply gradual and/or probabilistic
constraints to uncertain or vague data.

16.40 UberFire – Drools&jBPM Workbench framework (Mark Proctor 30min)
UberFire is a new project that forms the foundation of our 6.0 web
tooling. It’s standalone framework that provides a sophisticated
workbench framework for the web; where everything is a plugin. Come
learn about the Uberfire, and how you can use the workbench to build
your own web applications.

17.10 Drools&jBPM 6.0 and Beyond (Optional : open as long as people remain)
An open presentation and discussion about the design ideas, principles
and goals that are driving the development of Drools & jBPM version
6.0. This will be an optional and informal session where attendees will
have the opportunity to learn about what is coming, contribute ideas and
provide feedback that will be taken in consideration by the development
team.

17.10 Hands on Lab
Run at the same time as "Drools&jBPM and Beyond" and Beyond.
Solution Architects are on hand to help you with your coding problems,
and running examples.

“The ability to change rapidly is an absolute necessity for businesses
in today’s enterprise environment. Organizations that do not empower
their business users to quickly and effectively modify automated
business processes forfeit the ability to remain agile, competitive and
relevant,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of
middleware at Red Hat. “Polymita’s technology enhances Red Hat’s JBoss
Enterprise Middleware portfolio and specifically complements JBoss
Enterprise BRMS and jBPM.”

Polymitais a Barcelona, Spain-based start-up that created a comprehensive
BPM platform and was positioned as a Visionary in latest BPMS Magic Quadrant.

We're very happy they joined the JBoss family and are looking forward to join forces behind a singular vision, bringing our BPM offering to the next level even faster now!

A FAQ section already provides some answers, but more details on the how and what will be shared as soon as possible.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

I've been on vacation for a few weeks (was able to escape the Belgian weather and enjoy some France "joie de vivre"), and this time I decided to really leave work behind while on vacation. That means I'll probably be catching up on email for about a week or so, but the rest of the team hasn't been slacking, so what did I miss?

Tihomir has been experimenting with voice-driven BPM in the Designer, where you can use voice commands to create your processes. This is still our first, experimental attempt at including something like this during the modelling phase, but I definitely believe this will be useful for some of you (although I don't think everyone will all of a sudden start talking to their laptop ;)). Click on the link above to see a screencast of it in action.

Mauricio has written a series of blog entries on how processes and rules (or rules and processes) integrate (part1, part2 and part3). It starts with some examples on how processes and rules can be combined, and then goes into detail on how most BPM systems do it, and some of the more advanced features that are available in jBPM to do more advanced integration as well.

Maciej did a blog post about his presentation at JUDCon Boston this year on what he calls jBPM enterprise, which tries to improve the integration into Java EE environments. It bundles jBPM and Drools into JBoss Modules and uses OSGi and maven archetypes to create a web application on top.

Mauricio describes the current state of the jBPM form builder in this blog post, where he explains how you can use the form builder without depending on guvnor and how you can integrate forms in your own web application. Click on the link above to see the associated video.

Finally, Tihomir describes how task form editing can be done inline in the web designer, so while modelling your process, using a simple HTML template editor (with features like code completion and live preview) and customizable form widgets. Also includes a screencast of it in action, including a process form for use on mobile. Next is integration of the form builder as an option there too.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Our jBPM contributor Saiful Omar who also contributed the Designer Locking and Unlocking feature keeps doing a great job and has also contributed an implementation of a service node for the Microsoft Academic Search.
This service node is now available in the jBPM community service repository and can easily be installed and used in your own business processes using the jBPM Web and Eclipse tooling. Here
is a description of the service node inputs and outputs as well as
information on how to obtain the free MAS AppID which is required to use
the Microsoft Academic Search.

Thank you, and keep up the good work ! Check out Tiho's blog for more screenshots and details !

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

This fun, easy-to-understand video illustrates how the combined business
rules, business process and complex event processing capabilities of
JBoss Enterprise BRMS can help shipping companies become intelligent,
integrated enterprises.

Monday, July 16, 2012

In case you missed the emails, I'm doing a webinar presentation July 16th, 2012 on "jBPM 5: Build intelligent business processes".

Join this webinar to get the lowdown on
jBPM 5 from Kris Verlaenen, Red Hat’s jBPM 5 project lead. While you’re
at it, learn how to build intelligent business processes by leveraging
the combined power of business rules, business events, and processes.

Popular jBPM 5, now part of JBoss Enterprise BRMS
jBPM 5—one of the most popular open source BPM/workflow solutions on the market — is being productized as part of JBoss® Enterprise BRMS, which injects intelligence into static business processes.

jBPM key functions and future direction
Adopted by many enterprises for its lightweight footprint, embeddable
engine, and ease of use, jBPM takes these unique characteristics to the
next level by adopting the popular BPMN 2 standard—the choice of
standard for modeling and native execution. Check out this webinar to
learn about jBPM 5’s key functions and future direction, including:

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

jBPM was a big part of the JBossWorld keynote demo this year! The demo featured the JBoss Toy Store, a simple shopping cart application. You could use your mobile device to order various products (from phones to shirts), and a jBPM process was used to handle and manage the orders, all running in the cloud (on OpenShift).

The full video of the keynote is available below (you can skip to 14min30 if you immediately want to skip to the demo itself, which in total takes about 20min), this blog will explain some of the details on how jBPM was used to achieve this.

Whenever a new order was placed (either through one of the mobile clients or the web-based client), a process described the life cycle of the order. The process itself is shown below. The process itself is modelled using the BPMN 2.0 standard (both the visualization and the XML format used to store the process) and was defined in the web-based designer.

After some initialization, a Risk Assessment was done to decide whether the order was high or low risk. This was modelled using a Business Rule Task, that in this case used a web-based decision table to make the decision. In the demo, we simply look at the amount of the order, to decide whether it is high risk (larger than or equal to 500$) or not (less than 500$), but this could easily be extended with more complex logic.

All orders needed to go through a first Review (where a sales representative would manually check whether the order was valid and would accept or reject the order, for example to get rid of fake or unwanted orders etc.). High-risk orders would undergo an additional Vice President Review (our VP really wanted to keep control of the company). In the demo, the VP (played by Jay on stage) automatically rejected orders above 3000$ (just to make sure our participants needed to play smart to win ;)). Both review tasks were modelled using a User Task and contained various details on who to assign the task to, the data associated with the task, etc. After the review(s), the order was then either shipped (which we modelled using a domain-specific Service Task), or a rejection email was sent (using the out-of-the-box Email Service Task).

People in the audience were invited to participate in this experiment and put in orders. A leaderboard was used to show the overall progress. This showed the total amount of orders per person, and some dials and charts showing the order transaction rate, order backlog (orders still being processed), etc. The data was collected by listening to and/or querying the jBPM engine and/or task service.

We used a process monitor to visualize where all the orders were waiting. The number on top of each node shows how many orders are currently waiting there. This view is actually the web-designer that we extended with this monitoring information (that was updated every few seconds from a REST service that would provide the necessary information). We're working on getting this integrated in the project by default as soon as possible.

In the demo, we played out a scenario where a lot of the orders got
stuck in the VP Review (as Jay wasn't able to approve all the incoming
orders fast enough), generating a huge backlog. It's kinda difficult to explain, so I suggest you just take a look at the demo to see how it played out ;) By changing the business logic on the fly, we then allowed better throughput (and yes, we also used a bot to help Jay a little with approving all these orders more quickly, but everything was real, no cheating ;)).

Some technical details:

Everything (web-based designer + guvnor repository, jBPM engine, dashboards and process monitor) was running in the cloud (on OpenShift), on AS7. The laptops simply used a web browser to show the web-based apps running there.

The jBPM engine was embedded as part of the shopping cart application, and was invoked whenever a new order was retrieved, or when any of the review tasks were done. One session was used to handle all requests.

The engine was configured to user persistence (using Hibernate4 / JPA2 and an H2 in memory database)

The changes done in the application and by the jBPM engine were combined in one user transaction.

The default task service (that comes with jBPM out-of-the-box) was used to manage the task lists and the life cycle of each tasks. We used one local task service (running next to the engine) to make sure these changes were also done in the same transaction and avoid remote communication.

The source of the demo application is available here. You can download and run the application on your own laptop, or even push it to OpenShift as well.

We really enjoyed creating and doing the demo, and we hope so will you!

Friday, June 29, 2012

Last Monday, Red Hat announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.3. BRMS 5.3 adds support for jBPM, so that means you can get official support from JBoss for your business processes now. BRMS 5.3 has support for business processes (jBPM), business rules (Drools Expert) and complex event processing (Drools Fusion) in one integrated solution.

Over the last few months, we went through the productization process to strengthen and harden the community code, and we've been working with a set of early access customers to gather additional feedback.

With BRMS 5.3, you can buy multi-year support subscriptions and professional services, such as training and on-site consultancy. This provides you with the stability and support often required in production.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

As promised, the invitation for the workshop in Washington DC on June 21st.

JBoss BRMS (Drools and jBPM) Workshop

Have you ever wondered how or why you could use a Business Rules
Management System to respond to economic and regulatory changes more
quickly? Are you concerned about the effects of embedding key
operational functions deep within applications, which make them
difficult to change? Do your coders slow down your ability to keep up
with changes or requests from your organization's leaders and analysts?

If these issues affect you on a day to day basis as either a coder,
architect, or department or agency leader, these presentations and
hands-on labs will greatly expand your knowledge about when, where, and
how to employ the rules to solve the above-mentioned problems.
JBoss Business Rules Management System has many uses in government
including eligibility, determination, resource planning, budgeting, and
more.

The ecosystem that encompasses the Drools open source project and the JBoss BRMS

Benefits of rules systems, business workflows, and specific challenges to the government

The history of rules systems, where they are going, and how it can impact your agency

Various features of the BRMS via a hands-on demo

BPMN 2.0 and the future of Business Process Management

Be prepared to work hands-on with the tools, meet the team behind the
engine, and have your questions answered. This event will give you
unparalleled access to industry recognized leaders in the rules
community.

*Attendees are responsible for bringing their own laptop to
this event. Please make sure your laptop has the ability to copy files
from a USB, which will provide the software for the hands-on sessions,
and have JDK 1.6 already installed.

Register now as space is limited. We look forward to seeing you there!

Here's the official invitation for the NY Drools & jBPM workshop on June 19th. This is a workshop, including both presentations and hands on exercices. More news on the one in Washington DC later that week will follow shortly.

JBoss
BRMS Workshop

You are invited to attend the JBoss Drools and jBPM workshop in
New York City, on Tuesday, June 19th. The workshop will
be led by Drools and jBPM Projects core development team including
Mark Proctor its lead for 8+ years, Dr Kris Verlaenen, jBPM 5 project
lead, Edison Tirelli the lead around Complex Event Processing,
Prakash Aradhya, JBoss BRMS / BPM Product Manager and others. In this
day long session we will explore Business Workflows, Complex Event
Processing, Authoring rules, product road maps and much much more. Be
prepared to work hands on with the technology and tools, meet the
team behind the technology, and get your questions answered. This day
long event will get you unparalleled access to industry recognized
leaders in the business process and rules community.

*Attendees are responsible for bringing their own laptop
to this event. Please make sure your laptop has the ability to copy
files from a USB, which will provide the software for the hands-on
sessions, and have JDK 1.6 already installed.

Register now as space is limited. We look forward to seeing you
there!

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

It supports almost all BPMN 2.0 process constructs and
attributes (including lanes and pools, annotations and all the BPMN2 node
types).

Support for the few custom attributes that jBPM5
introduces.

Allows you to configure which elements and attributes you want
use when modeling processes (so we can limit the constructs for example to
the subset currently supported by jBPM5, which is a profile we will
support by default, or even more if you like).

The first screencast shows how to get the new plugin installed (you can also find some information in the documentation):

The second one shows how to use it to recreate a first version of our evaluation example (that is used in the installer):

Friday, June 1, 2012

One of the advantages of open-source is the concept of contributions. There are several benefits, where we create a win-win solution:

if you think some features is missing, you can add it yourself and contribute it back, so that other people can benefit as well

you don't have to maintain these additional code yourself, but once accepted, the project will evolve it as part of the code base

you benefit from further enhancements built on top of your contributions as well

And therefore, I'd like to thank two of our recent contributors.

Toshiya Kobayashi added support for internationalization to the jBPM Designer, and added a Japanese translation. Having a localized version of the tooling is extremely important in some areas, and we are very happy to be able to deliver this now. Should any of you see value in a translation in another language and would like to contribute, let us know.

Saiful Omar (@msaifulomar), a Lecturer of
Institute Technology Brunei who is doing his PhD studies at Loughborough University,
United Kingdom, is working on a novel Compliance and Adaptive Workflow
System that will utilize jBPM. As part of his system,
which is using the jBPM Designer for process modelling, Saiful was in
need to have the ability to lock parts of his process model in order to
prevent their further editing. He discussed that with us and we felt
that it would be a great feature to add to the jBPM Designer. Here's a screenshot of it in action.

Should you have a great idea you'd like to work on, or just have an urge you can't suppress now as well to do a contribution yourself, but don't really know where to start, just let us know. You can come chat with use at chat.freenode.net #jbpm

Friday, May 25, 2012

There will be several jBPM related presentations next month, so now is your chance to come and listen, meet the team and ask all your difficult questions ;)

First of all, I'll be doing a presentation on jBPM on JBossWorld, the large JBoss / Red Hat conference in Boston, June 26th - 29th, featuring talks about probably all JBoss projects. So don't miss it, and feel free to jump in for my presentation. There are tons of other interesting presentations as well, some of them might touch on jBPM as well, like for example how to combine processes and rules.We're also meeting with the jBPM and Drools team on the last day of the conference for a true codeathon, so bring your laptop and join us.

Before JBossWorld, there is going to be another JUDCon (June 25th - 26th) in Boston as well, targeted towards (and by) developers that really want to get to know the details of how everything works. We have three jBPM presentations in the Rules, Workflow, SOA track on the second day (by Tihomir, Maciej and myself).

I can already share that we'll also have two jBPM and Drools workshops the week before that, one in New York and one in Washington, like last year. Details will be shared soon, but these will give you a unique opportunity to get a day long training (presentations + workshop exercises) from the core team itself.

Monday, May 21, 2012

jBPM 5.3 has just been released. It includes a large amount of smaller improvements and fixes, and also contains a few new bigger features as well:

We would like to introduce our new Eclipse editor for defining business process in Eclipse (using the BPMN 2.0 standard). This editor will offer support for the full BPMN2 specification, and currently offers support for at least the same constructs as the previous plugin. We will continue to extend it over time with all the other constructs the jBPM core engine already supports, but we would like to hear your feedback as well !

A first version of the form builder has been released as well. This form builder allows you to create and edit your forms (for tasks and processes) in a graphical way, using drag and drop. It supports the usual components like labels, text fields and areas, buttons, etc. but already has support for various layouts, scripting, building your own components, etc. [Note: this first version is currently only supported on FireFox but we're working on adding support for all other browsers as well]

The web designer received a lot of love as well, with new features like user-friendly property editors, color themes, a dictionary, inline form editing, etc.

The jbpm-human-task module has been split up in a jbpm-human-task-core module and sub-modules for the different transport protocols available (hornetq, mina, jms), and a separate war that can be deployed in the application server (and is made easily configurable now). The installer now uses the war (with HornetQ) by default.

Integration between the jBPM console and Guvnor has been upgraded, to support new packages being added in Guvnor, removal of processes, etc.

Lots of persistence improvements to better support different databases, and we're using a new serialization technology (Protobuf) to better support upgrading / migration in the future.

You can download the release here (if you're not sure what you're looking for, downloading the full installer and then following the installer chapter to set up your environment and run through the tooling with a simple example is probably a good idea), or browse the documentation and javadocs.

Monday, April 16, 2012

This year, Mariano De Mayo has been nominated for the JBoss Community Recognition Awards, in the category New Features, for all the hard work he put into creating the new graphical form builder for jBPM:

Mariano De Maio - jBPMMariano De Maio has contributed a new graphical form builder component to the jBPM project. Mariano works for OSDE, the largest healthcare organization in Argentina, and they are using jBPM and Drools in this context and enabled Mariano to work on this full time for about a year. Task forms are necessary in the jBPM project whenever human actors participate in a business process and need to perform certain tasks and possibly fill in related results. Mariano developed a new web-based editor that allows non-technical users to define these task forms using a graphical editor where you can drag-and-drop building blocks (label, text fields, tables, dates, images, etc.) onto a task form. He added support for automatic form generation, input validation, triggers, loading form data from various sources, previews, and much more. This new component is now integrated with the other jBPM components, so business users can define these forms alongside their process definitions in Guvnor, and see these forms show up when performing their tasks at runtime in the jBPM console. The form builder is delivered as one of the mayor new features in the jBPM 5.3 release and we would like to thank Mariano for his significant contribution. To get an idea of the capabilities of the form builder, please take a look at some screencast of the form builder in action at http://vimeo.com/marianbuenosayres/videos

I'd like to ask everyone to help us so we can give him the credit he deserves and go to the JBoss Community Recognition Awards page, log in with your jboss.org community account and give him a vote :) Hurry, there's only a few more days left (until April 18, 5:00 p.m. ET)!

Thursday, April 12, 2012

We are happy to announce that we have released version 2.1 of the jBPM Designer. This is a big release which solves many issues we had in 2.0 as well as adds lots of new features. We are especially happy that jBPM Designer will also be included in the up-coming JBoss BRMS 5.3 release.

Here is a summary of what’s new and noteworthy in Designer 2.1 and we have also included a video below. Try it out and let us know what you think!

New and noteworthy

Numerous bug fixes. The number of commits for bug-fixes alone was over 100 between 2.0 and 2.1.

Increased performance for user interactions with the UI as well as loading time (JavaScript is now served compressed)

New Feature: Process dictionary support. Allows you to define your own process dictionary and use it inside your business processes.

New Feature: In-Line editing of Process and User Task forms. This new feature allows you to create/modify your process and task forms in-line which is great as you do not have to leave your modelling environment to perform this feature.

New Feature: Code highlighting and Code completion in Expression editors, code highlighting for process and task form editors and source views.

New Feature: Smart node deletion – deleting a node will also delete its incoming and outgoing connections unless they specify an expression

Support for both Drools Guvnor 5.3 and 5.4

Here is also a video for the Designer 2.1 release.Yes, Tiho went a little crazy on his video editing skills, we know ;)

You can download this version from soureforge just like the previous ones. Simply replace your existing designer war with the new one. Make sure to clear our your browser cache before starting to use the new version.

As always your feedback is more than welcome. Hit us up on IRC if you would like to contribute to the jBPM Designer. Have fun!

Friday, March 30, 2012

JBoss is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2012 program, which means that students can work on their favourite open-source project during the summer and get ultimate glory and a nice paycheck in return.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that gives university students a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period. Accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for future employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

JBosshas created a list of possible ideas you can take a look at, but you can always propose us your own ideas as well !

For jBPM, I've added two ideas to the list, but there is a Wiki page with over 10 possible proposals available here, including:

jBPM on android

Integrating jBPM with your own preferred project(s)

jBPM performance on steroids

Document management system

Mobile client(s) for jBPM

From BPEL to BPMN2

Social BPM using jBPM

Implement human tasks as a business process itself

Process mining for jBPM

jBPM and Drools for access control

jBPM and Drools for clinical decision support

The deadline for student applications is April 6th, 19:00 UTC, so if you're interested in participating this year, don't hesitate and be fast !

I'll be giving a presentation on the JAX conference this year in Germany. I'll be giving an overview of not just business processes, but also business rules and complex event processing, and how they all come together in the JBoss BRMS / BPMS product. So if you're already planning to go to that conference, make sure to add it to your time planner and I hope to see you there :)

Business Processes, Business Rules, Complex Event Processing with JBoss

JBoss's Business Rules Management System, BRMS, integrates various community projects such as Drools and jBPM bringing together a unique combination of business processes, business rules and complex event processing, unavailable elsewhere in the industry. Delivered in a single open source distribution and accessible from a common set of authoring tools, with JBoss BRMS customers can combine business processes, business rules and event processing in support of a broad range of decision management and process driven applications. This session explores the use cases for the BRMS, the benefits for the customer, and we will walk through many of the new features now available to enterprise developers. The discussion will center around the many powerful solutions that can be built leveraging rules, complex events, business process automation and the combination of the three. A special focus will be on the new BPM features that are coming with the integration of jBPM5 / BPMN2.0 into version 5.3 of BRMS.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

I'd like you all to welcome Maciej Swiderski to the jBPM team. Maciej lives in Poland and joins us from IBM research, where he was working on the Tivoli software. He started contributing to the jBPM project several years ago, and recently realized that BPM is actually his passion. We welcome him with open arms, and his experience with different BPM systems will definitely be useful in the future.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

In the webinar I did last week, I showed a demo that creates a simple reward system where employees can give rewards to each other (that then need to be approved by HR).

The demo shows how to create a new application from scratch using a clean setup (using the latest jBPM installer) where a business user and a developer work together to create the business process. We then generate the necessary JUnit tests and task forms for this process, deploy it to the Guvnor repository and execute it on the jBPM console.

The demo is now available as six small screencasts.

In the first video, a business user uses the web-based Designer (that is integrated into the Guvnor repository) to create a rough, first version of the process.

The business user defines that first someone from HR should approve (or reject) the request

The process should then send an approval email to they employee if the request was approved.

The developer can then import this process into his Eclipse workspace.

The second video shows how the developer edits this process and adds all the necessary details to make it fully executable.

The third video shows how a JUnit test can be generated from the process definition to test the process.

The developer generates a JUnit test for the process (see last part of the second video)

He then fills in some of the data that needs to be passed to the process

The test executes successfully

The fourth video shows how forms (a process form to start the process and a task form to approve requests) are generated from the process definition and customized a little.

The fifth video uploads all these files onto the Guvnor repository and builds them so they can be used in production.

Finally, the process is executed in the jBPM console, where we start a new approval process and let someone from HR reject it.

You should be able to reproduce this yourself completely, simply by following the steps in the video. Hope you all like it !

About Me

Kris is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at JBoss, by Red Hat, where he leads the jBPM project (an open-source business process management (BPM) suite), and is also part of the Drools project (an open-source Java rules engine). The jBPM project consists of a lightweight workflow engine in Java that support native BPMN 2.0 execution and various tools and features around that to support business processes throughout their entire life cycle.

Kris did a PhD in Computer Science at the Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven, Belgium. His main research area is policy-based management,
i.e. using declarative policy rules for configuring services, resulting
in highly-configurable, reusable services. He has experience and a
great intrest in policy-based and rule-based systems, workflow
management, service-oriented software development and clinical decision
support.

In his spare time, Kris also does athletics (ROBA) and plays volleybal (Berg Op Wijgmaal, Heren2).